Author's notes:This Frame works makes developping demos and maybe games a hell lot easier since the programmer doesn't have to worry about implementing the following things:TextureGeneration.Shaders handling including the new shading language OGLSL.TextureLoading.Multi-Texturing.Materials and Lights.Milkshape3D and 3D Studio max files (with an option to generate Tangents and binormals vectors ).Cursor rendering.Text rendering with different fonts.First person persepective camera.Frustum class.Cos and Sin look-up tables.Quaternion class.Normal maps generation.

and so on...It is largely inspired by Xith3D, and yet it is much more flexible (and less features complete).

I was all happy until vrm pointed me to the awt stuff... That apparently means no compilation using JET...

Just use .tga's then, it's only the .jpg/.png/.gif stuff that needs awt, comment it out. Personally I'm not to bothered about using awt, as I have no interest JET, if you want an .exe program the stuff in C++

An uber fast 3DS loader sounds sweet, I'll be able to ditch my shoddy .obj loader and be done with the buggers for good

not to start a flame debate about JET.But if U want to distribute your game to a large audience, consider using JET. Your game will be ditched by the mere fact that its java webstart . Jet makes it startup much faster. I read a articlesat puppygames about it.

That is the way every other game works. So people are used to this and expects it. With JET you get almost all the benefits of a c++ game. The biggest of course being that the player don't need to have java installed. In addition you get the developing benefits of java. Wich is important when you're a lone programmer with limited time.

Webstart is great, but until microsoft ships with the latest vm from sun it is only a novilty. The future of java gaming is native compiled.

Well if you intend to use jet, then all you need to do is clean up the part of the code that uses awt, and I know that it's barely 10 lines of code or so.I used Jet for a while and God it sucked; a simple demo that uses less than a thousand lines of code turns into a 10 mb exe? Wtf?Man, the latest set of ATi drivers, the 4.4, weigh around 22 mb, and they come out on a monthly basis.JRE on the other hand is "hardly" any bigger than 15 mb with minor updates via webstart every now and then.Bottom line is, if your game/demo/app is advertised properly and is attractive, downloading a JRE won't be a problem for a lot of people.Anyways, speaking of 3DS loader, I'm done with it since it was mostly a port from gametutorials demo to Java.However in the process I discovered few things that makes loading large models slow as hell.It took me sometime, but now it's more optimized than ever (uses NIO buffers, generates TBN vectors, relies on VBOs etc...) can't wait to put it here PS: I don't know how to animate models yet, any directions people?

That is the way every other game works. So people are used to this and expects it. With JET you get almost all the benefits of a c++

...And you also lose many of the benefits of developing in java. I only mention this because you seem to be forgetting it.

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Webstart is great, but until microsoft ships with the latest vm from sun it is only a novilty. The future of java gaming is native compiled.

ISTR you've made it clear before that you think very little of JWS. In the context of being someone who seems to think that jet only has advantages, this viewpoint makes a lot more sense.

It's not really debatable whether or not webstart is a novelty - like I recently pointed out to someone else, *MICROSOFT* has been pointing people to download the Sun JVM from their own website for some time. 50% of all new PC's come with Sun's JVM (which means, of course, webstart too) pre-installed. Of course it's not a novelty!

Or, to put it another way, with over 2000 visits to the JGF pages, I've had several complaints about ZIP games not working, one or two about applet games not working, and NONE about webstarts not working.

That suggests that the number of people using webstart successfully is not so low as people like you would have us believe. It also suggests that the contact address is not prominently-enough displayed (I'd expect about 10 times the number of complaints than I've actually had)

PS: sometime in the future, an upgrade of JGF will hopefully enable us to collate detailed stats - like the percentage of people who attempt to play a game who actually succeed - which we can then publish as firm data on things like this issue. But...it's going to require some co-operation from developers (how else are we going to know they started the game OK ? ).

That is the way every other game works. So people are used to this and expects it.[...]

People are used to alot of things, but that doesn't neccesarly mean, that they like all of em. If you can make something easier, people will like that.

Just installing a demo is a rather long mindnumbing task - with jws it's just one click away. One click and I can do something else until it's done with downloading/installing. That's really great. Tell me what's so good about: download, wait till it's done, locate the installer, double click the installer, wait, ok, yes, ok, there, ok, wait, ok, yes launch and then ok?

Nothing. And even non techy people agree there.

Oh and these empty folders with a ini file left or zombie registry entrys... I won't miss em

Just a friendly suggestion that since the ImageLoader at least is clearly modified from the Xith3D code you might at least put a comment in about that.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

/* * Copyright (c) 2003, Xith3D Project Group * All rights reserved. * * Portions based on the Java3D interface, Copyright by Sun Microsystems. * Many thanks to the developers of Java3D and Sun Microsystems for their * innovation and design. * * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: * * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, * this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. *

Java cool dude.. HJave you run your texture loader with 0.9. Cause I have problems with AWT and 0.9. I replaced my IMG loader with yourd yesterday but ran into the same problem.

AWT somtimes compress an image (because it can). This means that it fills less in the buffer. LWJGL 0.9 exspects a certain size of the buffer (it apparently calculates pixels). So the buffer is too small for LWJGL and it throws a BufferOverflow exception..

To test this try to load a easily compressed png image (like one thats all black).

People are used to alot of things, but that doesn't neccesarly mean, that they like all of em. If you can make something easier, people will like that.

Just installing a demo is a rather long mindnumbing task - with jws it's just one click away. One click and I can do something else until it's done with downloading/installing. That's really great. Tell me what's so good about: download, wait till it's done, locate the installer, double click the installer, wait, ok, yes, ok, there, ok, wait, ok, yes launch and then ok?

Nothing. And even non techy people agree there.

Oh and these empty folders with a ini file left or zombie registry entrys... I won't miss em

Well, how do you uninstall a Webstart app on Windows? It does not appear under Add/Remove Programs and this is where most users will look. And please do not tell me there are no zombie files left on your disk by the Webstart engine.

Anyway, all this sounds fine, but is still pure theory. How about a little practice? Make one game available as a WebStart URL and as a JET-compiled EXE download, count the number of succesful launches/downloads of each and of purchases that were results of those launches and downloads for a few months, and publish the results.

We would provide a temporary Excelsior JET license if your game is entirely LWJGL based (i.e. it does not use AWT/Swing). No purchase obligations, nothing. Just tell us the numbers.

I think it's already been mentioned that this is a "bug" that's already being fixed for 1.5 ?

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Anyway, all this sounds fine, but is still pure theory. How about a little practice? Make one game available as a WebStart URL and as a JET-compiled EXE download, count the number of succesful launches/downloads of each and of purchases that were results of those launches and downloads for a few months, and publish the results.

If someone can think of a fair way of doing this, then we could run the test on JGF with multiple games (whose authors were willing to take part). However, only if it's going to be done scientifically, which means starting by stating a hypothesis and then describing how that will be confirmed or disproved.

It would be moronic to assume you could just put two URL's side-by-side and get any meaningful results; a lot more thought is needed than that. Both in visual presentation (how do you measure the bias of people who don't care; how do you measure the bias of people who see the word "windows" and click on it, not caring whether it's an EXE or a JNLP? etc) and in technical implementation (how do you correctly measure the number of failed downloads that then succeeded later, e.g. after downloading the JRE, thereby not artificially inflating the "failure rate"? etc)

I also humbly suggest that E would have to be careful in their involvement with this, since it *potentially* makes it look like Excelsior is fighting a battle "against" webstart. Presumably your actual interest is in e.g. getting data to decide whether you need to add JWS-capabilities to JET exe's.

I think it's already been mentioned that this is a "bug" that's already being fixed for 1.5 ?

Ok, but do you know a gamer who has 1.5 installed but who is not a Java developer?

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If someone can think of a fair way of doing this, then we could run the test on JGF with multiple games (whose authors were willing to take part). However, only if it's going to be done scientifically, which means starting by stating a hypothesis and then describing how that will be confirmed or disproved.

It would be moronic to assume you could just put two URL's side-by-side and get any meaningful results; a lot more thought is needed than that. Both in visual presentation (how do you measure the bias of people who don't care; how do you measure the bias of people who see the word "windows" and click on it, not caring whether it's an EXE or a JNLP? etc) and in technical implementation (how do you correctly measure the number of failed downloads that then succeeded later, e.g. after downloading the JRE, thereby not artificially inflating the "failure rate"? etc)

How about the following scenario:

1. A visitor comes to the game Web site and clicks the "Download" link.

2. If a certain cookie ZZZ is present and its value begins with "JNLP:" or "EXE:", go to step 5.

3. The server tries to set the permanent cookie ZZZ with value "JNLP:" or "EXE:", chosen randomly with 1:1 probability, concatenated with randomly generated visitor ID.

4. The server redirects to another script that checks if the cookie was set successfully. If not, it serves the combined download page and does not count this visit.

5. The server serves the respective download page depending on whether the cookie begins with "JNLP:" or "EXE:", and amends the tracking log.

A download script can be used to track EXE downloads, but tracking JNLP downloads can be somewhat tricky given that e.g. AOL users connect through multiple proxies. At the very least, you could track download initiations.

The same cookie may be used to track sales.

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I also humbly suggest that E would have to be careful in their involvement with this, since it *potentially* makes it look like Excelsior is fighting a battle "against" webstart. Presumably your actual interest is in e.g. getting data to decide whether you need to add JWS-capabilities to JET exe's.

Well, our actual interest is to (hopefully) show that good old EXE (not necessarily JET-generated) has advantage over Webstart in terms of your game download and sales figures. Do not get me wrong - Webstart is great for the enterprise environment, where all workstations are under your control, you have got system administrators to JNLP-enable all browsers and install the same JRE on workstations, network is fast, users can be trained, and so on. But as a consumer willing to try your game, I do not care if your game was written in Java, C, or FORTRAN. I just want to get it to my desktop with as little effort and bandwidth as possible.

This issue is not limited to Java - I (as a person) do not have the .NET framework on my computer, and I will not download any software package that requires it or includes it.

the reality of stats : nobody use the .jar on .jnlp. Actualy a lot of **GAMER** compuers don't have the JDK1.4.2 you need some got 1.3, some got 1.4.1, some got MSJVM).All the gamers prefer the 5MB .exe than the 20MB useless JRE ..

* The reality is that "gamers" will download what they need to play a game they want to play.

* The reality is that "gamers" won't, they'll just give up.

* The reality is that "gamers" would rather get everything on CD.

* The reality is that "gamers" would rather write everything themselfs.

Actually, the reality is that gamers fall into rather alot of categories, hence the opening for lots of different types of games. Any statistics you draw would be open to interpretation in one way or another.

What you want to see is use cases. Unfortunately, this puts web start at bottom pegging since there arn't any games that use it and have been commercial successful. Obviously there are a fair few that have been using a .exe.

However, it wasn't that long ago that no 3D game had been commerically successful. Or any game for that matter..

Just offer both if it doesn't hurt you too much.

Kev

PS. Also, the 5MB limit applies for a small subset of games, not for every case.PPS. I still don't really understand JET, why can't I compile using AWT/Swing ?

* The reality is that "gamers" will download what they need to play a game they want to play.

I think there will be many such gamers only if your game is a true hit (a sequel to a true hit), you are known for previously making true hits, or you run a huge advertisng campaign. Imagine Doom IV will need JRE 1.8.2_11 - the Sun Java download server will think it is a DoS attack. Otherwise, there are so many shareware games out there to try...

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* The reality is that "gamers" won't, they'll just give up.

This is my experience. In a general case, if I download a piece of software (not necessarily a game) to address some problem and it does not install or run on first attempt, I usually delete it and forget it, unless (i) I used the previous version and was satisfied with it; (ii) I could not find an alternative or (iii) I have learned from somebody it will solve my problem completely, so that I have motivation for trying circumvent the problem.

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* The reality is that "gamers" would rather get everything on CD.

For a large game this is probably true. But if you have 100MB of textures, adding the JRE does not make any difference anyway.

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* The reality is that "gamers" would rather write everything themselfs.

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Actually, the reality is that gamers fall into rather alot of categories, hence the opening for lots of different types of games. Any statistics you draw would be open to interpretation in one way or another.

Ok, let's say we are talking about shareware games which demo versions, if written in C++, would not have exceed 5MB in size.

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What you want to see is use cases. Unfortunately, this puts web start at bottom pegging since there arn't any games that use it and have been commercial successful. Obviously there are a fair few that have been using a .exe.

Alien Flux is WebStartable.

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However, it wasn't that long ago that no 3D game had been commerically successful. Or any game for that matter..

3D makes a difference in gaming experience, whereas Java makes a difference in game development experience. So your analogy is not correct.

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Just offer both if it doesn't hurt you too much.

Right.

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PS. Also, the 5MB limit applies for a small subset of games, not for every case.

See above. Also, I do not think the subset you are talking about is that small.

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